By Elias Savada. The combination of hallucinogenic talk radio sketches and Taxi Driver‘s Travis Bickle on steroids affords actor R. Michael Gull to follow the filmmakers’ urgings: ‘Let’s just make some shit in our basement … and show hate like it really is.’” I’m still trying to wrap my head […]
The End Goes On – Apocalypse TV: Essays on Society and Self at the End of the World
The Leftovers (HBO, 2014-17) A Book Review by Thomas Puhr. While the collection lacks cohesion, the entries are consistently strong when considered in isolation; consequently, Apocalypse TV might work best as a media studies reference tool or even as a springboard into future projects.” Television shows about the apocalypse remain a hot […]
Instinct and Intimacy: Svetlana Cvetko on Show Me What You Got
By Zoe Kurland. There are all these little surprises because it’s all happening as it’s happening in real life among a group of people. That was the intention behind my style of shooting.” In an early scene in Svetlana Cvetko’s Show Me What You Got, Marcelo (Mattia Minasi), the son […]
The Slow Burn of Jordan Graham’s Sator
By Elias Savada. Graham plays you with creaking floorboards, flashlights shining in dusty interiors, and just plain gloom.” Fans of last year’s Tenet know that its title connects to the Sator Square, the ancient stone with early Christian contexts. Filmmaker Jordan Graham takes a different (and much lower budget) approach […]
Facts over Glory – Bumpy Road: the Making, Flop, and Revival of Two-Lane Blacktop
A Book Review by Tanja Bresan. Townsend successfully rips out the sentimentally and nostalgia of the counterculture era in which the film is set, serving cold facts…. reading the events [with] a sobering effect.” Sylvia Townsend’s production history Bumpy Road: The Making, Flop and Revival of Two-Lane Blacktop (Mississippi, 2019) […]
A Tragic Icon of Iranian Cinema – Bahram Beyzaie: A Mosaic of Metaphors
By Ali Moosavi. Bahman Maghsoudlou has produced such a comprehensive, yet intimate portrait of this great and tragic icon of the Iranian Cinema.” Ask any scholar of the Iranian Cinema to name the top five Iranian directors from the advent of cinema in Iran till now and Bahram Beyzaie will […]
Creation from Abandonment and Abuse: Nora Unkel’s A Nightmare Wakes
by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock. Mary Shelley’s nightmare wakes, explains the film, because her life was a waking nightmare.” The events surrounding the birth of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein are almost as famous as the novel itself. During the rainy summer of 1816, the scandalous Lord Byron played host to […]
Fabric and Fog, and Tied Together: Visconti’s White Nights (1957)
By Joe McElhaney. I. Fabric and Fog For Visconti, though, the white nights are those of winter, with the electric lights of the film’s urban setting creating one manifestation of white….” Dostoevsky’s white nights are those of a summer, when the sky of Petersburg “was so bright and starry.”(1) The […]
Short Takes from a Nation’s Youth: An Interview with Kamel Aouij and Mohamed Feki
France 1911 By Matthew Fullerton. New technologies continue to bridge distances, and the importance that Tunisia has accorded the seventh art of filmmaking in the realm of culture and the organization of events surrounding this art has helped.” Tunisia has for many years – and even in the midst of […]
Hollow Metacinema from Turkey: The Cemil Show
By Gary M. Kramer. This ambitious Turkish film is often artificial and pretentious.” Screening as part of the International Film Festival Rotterdam, February 4-7, the ambitious Turkish film, The Cemil Show, opens with a black-and-white square frame sequence from the (fictional) B-movie Kabus. Actor Turgay Göral (Basar Alemdar) is carrying […]